Anger Spreads Quicker Than Joy on Social Networks

Sites like Facebook and Twitter help us stay connected to others, but all this interaction is leading to a lot of anger, according to a new study from researchers at China's Beihang University.

Sites like Facebook and Twitter help us stay connected to others, but all this interaction is leading to a lot of anger, according to a new study from researchers at China's Beihang University.

The study, which examined human emotions on China's Twitter-like micro-blogging site Sina Weibo, revealed that anger spreads faster and wider than other emotions like joy on social networks. The research [PDF] suggests that posts you write out of anger will have more of an impact than those expressing happiness.

The researchers - Rui Fan, Jichang Zhao, Yan Chen, and Ke Xu - set out to investigate how four sentiments — anger, joy, sadness, and disgust — propagated through social networks. If a user sent an angry tweet, for instance, the researchers aimed to determine how likely the recipients were to also send out an angry message or retweet the same sentiment.

The researchers examined some 70 million tweets from 200,000 users of Weibo, which has attracted more than 500 million users in less than four years. They determined the sentiment of each tweet by analyzing emoticons they contained.

"We find the correlation of anger among users is significantly higher than that of joy, which indicates that angry emotion could spread more quickly and broadly in the network," the study noted. In comparison, "the correlation of sadness is surprisingly low and highly fluctuated."

The researchers also found that there is a stronger "sentiment correlation" between two users if they share more interactions. In addition, "users with larger number of friends posses more significant sentiment influence to their neighborhoods."

The study follows earlier research, which found that fights on social networks have real-life implications. That survey, released in April by corporate training firm VitalSmarts, found that one in five people have reduced in-person contact with someone after a cyber fight.

Angela has been a PCMag reporter since January 2012. Prior to joining the team, she worked as a reporter for SC Magazine, covering everything related to hackers and computer security. Angela has also written for The Northern Valley Suburbanite in New Jersey, The Dominion Post in West Virginia, and the Uniontown-Herald Standard in Pennsylvania. She is a graduate of West Virginia University's Perely Isaac Reed School of Journalism.
More »